Shatter the Earth (Cassandra Palmer 10)

Pink flooded back into the face, burning hot along my cheekbones; the panicked eyes steadied and started to burn, to the point that I almost thought I could see past the glamourie; the trembling hands stilled and one of them snatched up a comb and began attacking the snarl of tangles on my head.

There was a time, not so long ago, when an attack like that would have had me in hysterics, shrieking and running away, looking for a place to hide. I still felt like that a little, could feel that girl somewhere inside, silently screaming. But there was someone else in there now, too.

Someone bigger. Someone badder. Someone who had tasted power and knew how to wield it.

Someone who it was a very bad idea to piss off.

And someone who had new abilities to call on, I realized, the comb stilling in my hand. I wasn’t sure why Nodo d’Amore worked here when by all logic it shouldn’t have. Maybe because human logic and magical logic were often very different things. I just knew that it did, and that opened up some new possibilities, didn’t it?

Maybe there was a way to find out what was going on, or at least to try. And part of me wanted to try. I wasn’t sure if it was me or my new vampire instincts, but part of me wasn’t just angry, it was furious. We’d been attacked, by something wearing our lover’s skin, and it wanted to rend, to tear, to completely annihilate the one responsible.

But for that, we had to find it first.

I sat quietly at the table, probably looking much the same as a moment before, had there been anyone watching. But instead of trembling in fear, I was extending my senses, all of them, old and new. Searching for . . .

I wasn’t sure.

But I found something; hell, I found everything.

I was sitting all alone in a darkened room, yet the house suddenly glowed with life all around me. I couldn’t see other beings, at least not in the usual way. But I could feel them, as bright columns of heat and light against my mental vision.

They were everywhere: a cat in the kitchen, curled up near the stove, its little limbs twitching as it chased some small creature in its dreams; a line of birds on the roof, their feathers fluffed out, their bodies as close as possible to the hot air that blew out of the chimneys; a dog snuffling around the garbage cans behind a tasteful hedge out front, until it rousted out a rat and took off after it down the street.

But the brightest lights were the humans, glowing like beacons in the night. My senses widened and the house unfolded like an origami structure all around me. I had to keep my eyes closed, or the physical vision interfered with the mental, but I could feel my face turning in different directions, completely enthralled.

I could see the war mages that guarded the court prowling around on their patrols, with boiling masses of magical energy following them like clouds. They left trails of magic behind them everywhere they went, creating glowing pathways all over the house and gardens. And before one path completely faded out, another mage came by, renewing it again.

Leaving a solid wall of protection around the much smaller lights inside.

Most of them were sleeping, their little bodies curled up under layers of blankets, their breathing low and even. Young initiates in the creche on this floor, I assumed. All of them grouped together in their dorm-like beds.

Slightly larger columns of light were bunked up in rooms of three or four, scattered all over the house. Initiates still, but old enough to warrant a bit more privacy, a bit more room to call their own. They were mostly asleep, too, although some were awake and giggling with each other under the covers. I didn’t know why—

Until, suddenly, I did. Because Mircea was also a mentalist, something I’d long known, although it was shocking how easily his abilities dipped into those girls’ minds, retrieving the wanted information without any real effort at all. Three of them were perusing a fashion magazine under the covers, defying their curfew with a spelled candle, while a story below, another was reading a book of pulp fiction and sighing over the hunky hero.

The older girls presumably had their own rooms, but they weren’t in them. They were clustered together in Gertie’s suite for some reason, because she wasn’t asleep, either. Although somebody probably wished she was.

“—my house, my rules.”

The usually loud, almost strident voice came weakly to my ears from this far away, even with vamped up hearing. But I could hear her. And focusing on one particular subject seemed to enhance my abilities, because the Gertie-shaped column of light suddenly came into much better focus.

She didn’t look happy, from what I could tell. And neither was the voice that answered her. “Your house, your responsibility!”

It was a guttural voice, almost too much so to understand. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was where it was coming from.

I tensed up, thinking that I might have just found my attacker, because Gertie appeared to be addressing open air. But then I noticed that her chin was tilted upward slightly, and my mental eye followed her line of sight. And widened, because not one, but two Weres were suspended in mid-air, their bodies almost touching the ceiling and backlit by the chandelier, which is why I hadn’t immediately noticed them.

That and the fact that I didn’t expect to see them levitating around like two huge, furry balloons!

They didn’t look like they’d expected it, either, and were snarling and pawing at the air, almost running in place. And going nowhere. But exactly why they weren’t, I couldn’t tell.

And then I got a repeat of the telephoto lens aspect of VampVision. I widened my focus, trying to see what was holding them up, but instead of getting a better view that way, I was sent rocketing ahead, through walls and stairs and more walls. Until it felt like I was suddenly present in that room, the ghostly sketches of the furnishings dimmed by the glowing bodies all around me.

Two of which Gertie was holding up through the Pythian power.

I didn’t know how—I guess we hadn’t gotten to that lesson yet—but I could see it clearly: glimmering, golden striations radiating out from her shoulders, almost like wings. Or, to be more accurate, since they had the two Weres by the throats, like extra hands threatening to choke them. But not enough to prevent speech, unfortunately.

“We hold you responsible, Pythia! Turn the bitch over or—”